RC:TNG, Blog and Survey Updates in PayScale's "French" Release

We've made updates to the new Research Center (lovingly dubbed: RC:TNG), to the survey, to the blog and even some stuff under the covers. Read on to see all the cool things we're doing.

Research Center: The Next Generation Updates

Launching the RC:TNG exclusively in the United Kingdom first allowed us to study and understand user behavior at a smaller scale before we applied our leaning globally. And, we've been doing just that; I've spent the last three weeks in Google Analytics and Mouseflow. We've learned a lot, and our most recent updates reflect those lessons.

We've moved the buttons to "drill in," down closer to the charts. This may seem simple, but a lot of people weren't seeing them and, consequently, weren't able to get more relevant data.

We've added some small "guiders" for an introductory tour of the product.

We've converted the (almost) all of the navigation links to "drill down" links, with an indicator of how much they change pay.

We've added a map!

Author Pages

As our Career News section expands with more articles and more authors, we've found ourselves and our users thinking: "I'd like to know more about this author and their background," and "What else has this author written?" Et voilà: here is my author page.

Salary Question Design Cleanup

One of the side-effects of the "maximally hobo" development methodology (briefly describe in the previous release's blog post) is that only the most important things get built. Sometimes things that are very important don't make the cut, but need to be addressed as some point. The "salary" question in the survey is one of those things. We had the basics done and working... but it needed some cleanup. We did just that.

Also, we did some work to automatically answer questions for you! If your job typically gets a bonus, we'll ask you for the bonus... and if your job typically doesn't, we don't ask you (You can still add it though)

Under the Cover Updates

This may sound boring, but it may actually have an impact you may see.

We've moved a chunk of our infrastructure off of our old "task queue" system an onto RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ lets computers pass messages around to each other very efficiently. Our old system worked, but it occasionally caused very high stress on our database and caused the site to perform slower than normal. But, NO MORE!

Fin

A lot of work went into this release by our team, as well as the platform team. Thanks Chris and Adam!